Globalisation and Crime Flashcards
What is Globalisation?
The widening, deepening and speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness in all aspects of life from the cultural to the criminal, the financial to the spiritual
Held et al 1999
Globalisation can often be seen as a bad thing for example Brexit is seen as a result of globalisation
What has globalisation got to do with crime?
Globalisation has made it easier for crime to spread
The rich countries and the west is the marketplace for globalised crime
With globalisation, the world has become a single territory for both legal and illegal business. Crime has become transnational
What are the theorists for this topic?
Beck Taylor Held et al (not priority) Farr Hobbs and Dunningham Bauman Detica
The rise of transnational organised crime:
Define, context and example
Define: Transnational organized crime (TOC) is organized crime coordinated across national borders, involving groups or networks of individuals working in more than one country to plan and execute illegal business ventures. In order to achieve their goals, these criminal groups use systematic violence and corruption.
Context: Been around for a long time, last two decades - 15% of the world’s GDP
Globalisation has created transnational organised crime networks which employs millions of people and are deterritorialized.
Examples: Sex, drugs, prostitution, web based crime (the dark web- SL20) identity theft(SL22), pedophile networks emerging, trade of fake drugs, The McMafia(SL21)
Farr (2005) suggests two main forms of global criminal networks, what are they?
Established Mafias, like the Italian- American Mafia, the Japanese Yakuza and the Chinese Triads, which are very long established groups, often organised around family and ethnic characteristics. These have adapted their activities and organization to take advantage if the various new opportunities opened by by globalization
New organized crime groups, which have emerged since the advent of globalisation and the collapse of the communist regimes of Russia and Eastern Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. These newer groups include Russian, Eastern Europe and Albanian criminal groups, and the colombian drug cartels, which connect with both one another and the established mafias to form part of the network of transnational organised crime
What is Glocalism?
Transnational crime is now global and Local - term coined by Hobbs (1998)
Local: relies on local networks of pimps and drug dealers to connect to global networks.- drug dealers use whatsapp which is encrypted - google won’t give the codes for whatsapp technology, this is allowing local drug dealers to get away with things.
Global: local criminals require access to globally produced drugs and illegal migrants. - Drugs are produced in mountains of Columbia and the people are from foreign countries
Global and local crime networks are now interconnected. - they are connected mainly through technology and the access to crime
From Global to Local: Hobbs and Dunningham 1998
What did they claim? Include an example
What did they say? They suggest that global criminal networks work within global contexts as independent local units.
For example the international drugs trade and human trafficking require local networks of drug dealers, pimps and sex clubs to organize supply at a local level and existing local criminals need to connect to the global network =s to continue their activities such as accessing drugs, counterfeit goods and illegal immigrants for cheap labour or prostitution.
Explain Risk Consciousness. Which theorist?
Define: Beck argues that globalisation has created a sense of instability in people’s lives and they have therefore become more anxious about crime happening to them.
Example: Brexit is one example of this - security issues of countries and coordinating with other countries about terrorism and brexit is rejecting globalism a consequence of a fear over immigration / The Sun and the Daily Mail ‘bulgarian crime groups taking over’
Explanation: Some of this could be a moral panic (society panics about something on a large scale) ‘eastern europeans damaging our society’ / organised crime has massively increased in the UK mainly due to policy cuts
Growing Individualism Bauman(2000) Postmodernism:
Key ideas and link to Taylor.
Key ideas: Argues that in late modernity there is growing individualization
Any improvement to the living conditions and the happiness of individuals now depends on their own efforts, and they can no longer count on the safety nets provided by the welfare state to protect them from unemployment or poverty
Taylor suggests individuals are alone to weigh the costs and benefits of their decisions and to choose the course that brings them the best changes of gaining the highest rewards. - these rewards are increasingly seen as the ideology of consumerism promoted by a western based global media
What is Human Trafficking?
Define: Human trafficking is he illegal movement and smuggling of people for a variety of purposes ranging from the illegal removal of organs for transplants, the exploitation of women and children for prostitution and other forms of sexual exploitation, to forced labour and practices similar to slavery.
There is also a related global criminal network dealing with the trade in illegal immigrants: smuggling people at high costs into countries which they are unable to enter legally
Human Trafficking fact - 2014 estimations
The national crime agency in 2014 estimated there were as many as 13,000 people in Britain who were victims of slavery, including women forced into prostitution, domestic staff, and workers in fields, factories and fishing.
Explanation of Human Trafficking
Explanation: Human trafficking is a consequence of those living in poverty in the developing world seeking out better lives in the Western developed nations. At the same time these Western countries introduce stricter controls for migration.
The immigrants therefore pay organised criminal gangs to traffic them across borders. For those that survive the journey they are left deeply in debt and often forced into prostitution and other forms of exploitative employment in the black economy.
- Western economies benefit from this, cheap prostitution and cheap labour
What is money laundering?
Define: Money laundering is concerned with making money obtained illegally look like it ame from legal sources. Castells calls this the ‘matrix of global crime’, because criminals, like drug dealers and human-traffickers, deal with large amounts of cash, which they need to ‘launder’ to avoid their criminal activities from coming to the attention of law-enforcement agencies
Explanation of money laundering
The deregulation of global financial markets, banking secrecy and modern communications technology, like the internet, make it possible to launder ‘dirty money’ through complex financial transactions involving almost instantaneous repeated electronic movement of vast sums around the world.
This makes it very difficult for law-enforcement agencies to track the source of money, and hard to identify which country is responsible for law-enforcement
What is cyber crime? Include context
Define: Cyber crime refers to a wide range of criminal acts committed with the help of communication and information technology, predominantly the internet
Context: Cybercrime is one of the fastest growing criminal activities in the world. Cyber crimes are glocal(SL6), in the sense that many offenders and offences in the UK often have links outside the country
